


Oranges and Lemons

by archea2



Category: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Case Fic, Crossover, Gen, Humor, Sherlock Holmes and Bees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 08:17:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20927054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: “I think,” Sir Henry Clithering said, smiling, “that Raymond means more matter and less art. Two corpses for one sleuth, my boy, am I right? The Cubra libre of murder?”“Or two sleuths on a case.” Joyce waved a jaunty hand, allowing the firelight to catch the glint of a small diamond on it and flash it back. “Only, that’s a bit much to ask of amateurs. I doubt any of us have had the occasion to team up with a Nick Carter or a Holmes.”“Actually, my dear…”





	Oranges and Lemons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Visardist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Visardist/gifts).

> Dear Visardist,
> 
> You said "canon period" and I'm afraid I read no further! Hope this still agrees with your vision of the crossover. I've gone for the first iteration of the Tuesday Club, since it's my favorite, much as I love Colonel and Mrs Bantry.:)

When the year came full circle and brought the Tuesday Club its first anniversary, it was duly acknowledged. Miss Marple made sure there was a Madeira cake to escort the sherry on its round; Joyce Lemprière, soon to be West, made a lovely sketch of the gathering; and Raymond West, the former’s nephew and latter’s to-be, rose to the occasion with his customary knack for bold phrasing and made a speech.

“Let us celebrate by upping our game,” he concluded. “We fine sleuths are entering our second year of detecting, so perhaps we should double the effort tonight. As I recall, old James once declared that the best way to pepper a horror story was to cast _ two _ children in it -”

“Why, yes, dear. Any Sunday School teacher would agree with him.”

“- and thus,” Raymond continued undeterred, “we should consider a two-for-one.”

“My dear boy,” Mr Petherick interjected wryly. “I don’t know that it’s wise. Unless you wish me to bore the living nightlights out of you with injuries & damages, fraud & deceit, or aiding & abetting. The law is _ very _ fond of its doublets.”

“I think,” Sir Henry Clithering said, smiling, “that Raymond means more matter and less art. Two corpses for one sleuth, my boy, am I right? The Cubra libre of murder?”

“Or two sleuths on a case.” Joyce waved a jaunty hand, allowing the firelight to catch the glint of a small diamond on it and flash it back. “Only, that’s a bit much to ask of amateurs. I doubt any of us have had the occasion to team up with a Nick Carter or a Holmes.”

“Actually, my dear…”

Every eye in the room darted to Miss Marple, whose cheeks had gone pink. A year ago, the company would have put it down to the sherry and “indulged the old dear” - but though the year was gone, it had taught them well. A hopeful silence ensued.

“Yes, Miss Marple?”

“I did have the pleasure of meeting one of these gentlemen. Not Mr Carter - I never travelled further than Italy, and he, poor man, had his plate (blue plate, I hear they call it) full enough in New York. But you mentioned Sherlock Holmes, and his name put me in mind of a quaint story that happened to me… let me see, that would be twelve years ago. Yes, 1920. When I had a touch of anaemia, and my doctor prescribed a month of sea air along with the usual iron and chicory.

I had some friends in Sussex that spoke highly of Brighton. But Brighton was a little too _ Vanity Fairish _ for my taste, and I wrote back asking if they knew of any quiet village in the South Downs. They did, and I set out accordingly, having booked rooms in a guesthouse called The Arundel. A name that told me it was run by the kind of people who, having got an education, like to wear it on their sleeve” - Raymond West looked self-conscious - “and _ not _ call their house The Skylark.”

“My dear Miss Marple, that’s a little harsh. My own vicarage -”

“Oh, Dr Pender, I mean no slight on The Priest Whole. A pun, yes,* but also a memo to dedicate yourself to the parish. There’s humbleness in your method.”

The clergyman parted his arms in humble acknowledgement.

[* On the Priest Hole, that hiding-place carved in some old Catholic houses.]

“But Mr Tompsett loved nothing more than to boast of his Eton days, and City days, before a few... unwise bets on the Central American banana made him a country mouse. Now he ran this cottage near the sea, which his wife had remodelled into a guesthouse. It could host up to four guests, though I was the only one at the time.”

“Let me guess,” Sir Henry said. “The house really belonged to Mrs Tompsett?”

“Yes. A very agreeable woman, and a wise one - I liked her at once.”

“Ah,” Joyce said dramatically. “Enter the victim!”

“No, not at all, dear - you miscast her.”

“Well, she can’t be the murderess if you liked her.” Joyce rested her elbows on her knees, her chin into her cupped hands, and eased herself into further pondering. “Let’s see. Was the husband a big, hearty, florid-faced fellow? With a ruddy complexion?”

“Joyce! You’re dithering.”

“Not at all, my darling Watson. Like Aunt Jane, I’ve learnt to spot types and patterns in life’s experience... and ditto her own stories.”

“Very clever, my dear. And Mr Tompsett _ was _ of a ruddy complexion. But I ought to add, in all fairness, that he’s the victim.”

“Oh,” Joyce said, taken aback. “Wrong pattern.”

“Meanwhile,” Sir Henry reminded them gently, “I’m waiting for Holmes’s grand entrance. The man still casts a long shadow at Scotland Yard.”

“He made it at the inquest,” Miss Marple said, “after Mr Tompsett was found dead. It was the bees, you see. They were still buzzing all over his body when I found him that morning: scores of them, like a cloudy omen, all black and gold. Oddly enough, none of them had stung him - he’d died of a heart attack. Poor Mr Tompsett was terrified of bees.

I had turned in early that night - it was three days after my arrival - and the iron had worked its magic enough that I felt like an early morning stroll in the yard. A nice gardened yard, too. Mr Tompsett saw to it himself, although, like most of our City exiles, his approach was very hit or miss. He fancied himself a scientific man, being, as I said, an educated one, and as such would pooh-pooh any advice that wasn’t spoken for by Mr Einstein and his peers. If one advised him to plant a tulip under a waxing moon, he’d laugh at one’s Victorian tomfoolery. But tell him you’d just heard on the wireless there was a new theory about the gravitational-to-lunar ratio and its bio-effects, and he’d be all ears.”

“The force of lingo,” Mr Pethrick said with a lawyer’s nod. “A lot of influence can be derived from it, in and out of courtrooms.”

“Happily for Mr Tompsett, his next-door neighbours were men of science - up to a point. The cottage on his left belonged to Mr Prevett, a bachelor who had worked for Wolseley Motors most of his life. The name will only ring a bell for us old fogeys, but before Mr Rolls and Mr Royce, there was a Mr Wolseley and he made the first ever British cars. Mr Prevett had only been a cog in his gears, but he’d scraped together a nice little fortune doing so before he retired from - let me see, was it Birmingham? Yes, Birmingham. As for the right-side cottage, with its lovely lush garden and its dozen hives…” 

There Miss Marple paused, not to cement her audience appeal, but to recover an errant stitch. 

“Sherlock Holmes,” Joyce sighed in open ecstasy.

“Must have been a centenarian,” her betrothed remarked pointedly.

“No more than I was,” Miss Marple said, looking over at him with the shadow of a wink. “But then, sharp-mindedness _ does _ keep one young, I always think. He was well into his seventies, but there was something about him that felt… timeless. For one thing, he was dressed neither as a Victorian relic nor as a Modern Man, only as a gentleman.”

“With that ear-flapped hat?” Dr Pender asked eagerly. “My housekeeper’s little boy put it at the top of his Christmas list. I promised his mother I’d look it up in Harrods, where I was told in no uncertain terms that no city man would be seen in one. So I tried my tailor, born and raised in St Mary Mead, who swore up and down it was a London fad.”

“No deerstalker,” Miss Marple said. “No hat, actually. He still had a nice head of hair, white of course, and his eyes were as piercing as Dr Watson makes them out to be. He did bow to me as I walked past him to testify - if you ask me, the reports of his boorishness are _vastly _ exaggerated. Of course, he also cut me short a minute later when I was describing Mr Tompsett’s fear of bees. ‘Apiphobia,’ he said quite loudly, and, when called to the pulpit, added that it was absolutely groundless. Yes, Tompsett had complained time and again about the hives: they were lined up against their common hedge, too close for the man’s comfort. But this was the countryside, and it was hardly reasonable to expect Mr Holmes to ground his charges. No, he couldn’t say why the whole swarm had taken upon itself to harass the victim. For bees to turn into a firing squad, Mr Holmes explained, one of several factors must be invoked, none of which applied there and then. I shall not try to reproduce his parsing, which was quite detailed and went uninterrupted for a while (though the coroner _ did _ make a half-hearted thrust, that was met with an impatient ‘Tshhh’). It was a very thorough speech, which exculpated the bees from any rational motive for crankiness.”

“Especially,” Sir Henry murmured, “as they did not sting Tompsett.”

“It was clear to me and everybody else that Mr Holmes was loath to think his bees irrational. He’d much rather think they had been sicced onto the victim. But how? There is no such thing as a trained bee, let alone a trained swarm. The coroner, who had examined the corpse, had found nothing amiss. A vague suggestion that Mr Tompsett’s red scarf might have annoyed them was instantly shot down by Mr Holmes on the ground that bees cannot see the colour red. 

Mr Prevett was heard next, and since he was among the last people who had talked with the victim, his testimony was of interest. It was not, however, helpful. He’d called on his friend the evening before to settle a debt which the latter owed him. Tompsett, it transpired, had been hatching a plan to fund a trust for a large sea-themed museum in the hope of attracting more visitors to the village."

“_ A-ha! _,” Mr Petherick said. “There we are. If I had a penny for every trust idea that proved untrustworthy...”

"And he had sworn Prevett to secrecy while borrowing a substantial sum to launch his project. No one was to know about it, not even Mrs Tompsett. Prevett, while doubtful about the scheme, had trusted his friend to refund the money if his plan came to nothing. That was three months earlier. When he came for news, Tompsett said he was still working on it and urgently begged for a further delay. Prevett agreed after some hesitation, and they shook hands on it.

All of this Prevett now disclosed reluctantly, having no wish, he said, to add to Mrs Tompsett’s distress. In fact, he only did so because the Arundel cook, who had been bringing in some produce as they stood in the yard, overheard them. That is, she heard Tompsett mention a sea trust that would “be worth a gold mine if it worked”, right before the handshake.

Mrs Tompsett was indeed distressed - kept saying she had no idea - she’d been in charge of the bookkeeping (a wise woman, as I said) and the books showed nothing of it. Prevett, who looked genuinely sorry, hastened to repeat that he had no urgent need of the money and they would find a way of settling the business. He sat next to her and patted her hand, and it was obvious that he meant every word of it.

The coroner was now asked if, in his opinion, suicide by bees was to consider.

Mr Holmes looked positively outraged - whether on the insects’ behalf or his own, I can’t say. 

The coroner said no, and I could see that he was sorely tempted by a verdict of accidental death. But here stood Mr Holmes like a lean, white-haired lion with an eagle’s nose, denying accident with a will. A stronger man would have wavered. The coroner put the inquest on hold for twenty-four hours.”

Having reached mid-course in her story, Miss Marple allowed herself a sip of sherry. The narrative so far lay before Tuesday Club, a gauntlet to be taken up; and the Club, as one body, rushed towards it. 

“Did he order an autopsy?” Sir Henry wanted to know. “Seems like the proper move to me.”

“He didn’t. Not that it would have changed anything,” Miss Marple added generously.

“Was the wife carnally deprived? You said she was handsome, and to judge by D. H. Lawrence, the country air can be quite, er, invigorating...”

“_Really_, Ray. Aunt Jane, I’ll rephrase this for him. You said Mrs Tompsett had been a local girl - perhaps she’d had a village swain or two, with good reason to bear Tompsett a grudge?”

Miss Marple set her glass down again and twinkled at them. “You bright young things have the oldest-fashioned ideas about villages. Mrs Tompsett may have had her pick of suitors, but none of them seem to have loitered on - they married elsewhere, I dare say, or left the county. At least, I heard no scandal about them that I can recall.”

“Still,” Raymond said stubbornly. “_Cherchez la femme_. She might have tired of keeping house for a spendthrift, and as a country girl she’d have known about bees. She could have... Aunt Jane, what _ does _ it take to annoy a bee?” 

“An absent queen,” Miss Marple said. “Or a windy day.”

“The wind blows where it will,” Dr Pender quoted with a smile.

“But she could have snuck through the hedge and kidnapped the queen.”

“And risk being chased by the swarm? Besides, Aunt Jane _ liked _ her!”

“May I interrupt?” Mr Petherick said. “The only fact that’s been established is that Tompsett felt the need to borrow money for some wild goose scheme. I doubt that Prevett was his only target. And his other creditors might not have been so patient, once it became known that the trust was insubstantial. Perhaps one of them thought he could repay himself on Tompsett’s assets, rather than wait for some hypothetical refunding.”

“Would the law authorize it?”

“Oh, yes. As long as there was a written contract to show.”

“But we still have no idea of the means. _ How _ would they sic the Holmes bees, unknown to Holmes, across the hedge?”

“Lay a trail,” Joyce suggested. “Rub some honey on their palm, shake Mr Tompsett’s, and presto! Like a call whistle.”

“My dear girl. Bees are not attracted to honey - bees _ make _ honey. You’re confusing cause and effect.”

“Well, I give up. Take up your yarn, Aunt Jane, and I don’t just mean the knitting.”

“I will, unless these gentlemen have another theory they’d like to proffer?”

The gentlemen having declined, Miss Marple settled more firmly into her chair and resumed her tale.

“The moment we were dismissed, I felt uneasy. Like Mr Holmes I found the bees’ assault very odd, and I could see that an open verdict would do more harm than good. I waited until I saw Mrs Tompsett surrounded by her friends, and then I hastened to catch up with Mr Holmes. Being a strong walker for his age, he did not stop at once, yet I hailed him until he had no choice but to turn around. I could see in his face that he thought me a busybody, or worse, a reader of the _ Strand _\- which I had been, admittedly. 

‘Mr Holmes,’ I said, making the best of a thin gambit, ‘forgive me if I am forward. But I can see that you are discontented with the situation, and I would hate for your book to suffer from it.’

He blinked a few times, and then he smiled. Well, his eyes did - his lips only followed the uptilt of his eyebrows. 

‘What makes you think I’m writing a book?’

I told him it was what nine gentlemen out of ten did when retiring. My dear father began a _ Complete History of Heresies_, never to be completed, and poor Lord Hampson, the hunt master, took a nom de plume and wrote those limericks for _ Punch _ I’m told are very naughty. The parallel tickled Mr Holmes, I could say; but then he grew serious again.

‘My bees must be cleared,’ he said, ‘and their strange fling explained, or _ The Practical Book of Beekeeping _ is swamped.’ He paused, letting the full weight of his gaze bear on me. Which _ was _ a trifle rude, since we hadn’t been introduced, but he was never one to do things formally. What he saw seemed to please him, for he nodded as if to himself, and extended his arm. ‘You won’t simper and beg for a chaperone,’ he said, ‘and I can see that your anaemia is on the mend. I shall be happy to offer you a cup of tea if you can see your way to making one. It’s my housekeeper’s day off.’”

“For shame!”

“As I said, not a Modern Man. Still, I took his arm and he took me to his cottage. It was as disorderly as you might expect a bachelor’s haunts to be, but with a rugged charm of its own. Beams and stones walls, and papers everywhere the eye could see. I must confess that my curiosity got the better of me, and I couldn’t help letting my gaze roam a little after those knick-knacks Dr Watson mentions ever so often. But I couldn’t see any. There _ was _ a photograph, but it was of the good doctor and his (second, I think) wife. As for the Persian slipper, it was now nailed to the kitchen wall and made to serve as a tea canister.”

Mr Petherick looked aghast. “That can’t have been very hygienic!”

“Mr Holmes moved some of his papers away while I made the tea. I taught him my dear grandmother’s recipe, with the honey and cream first, and he thanked me with a fresh honeycomb.”

“Which you kept preciously to this day, Aunt Jane?”

“No, dear, I ate it the next day. Keepsakes are all very well, but honey is honey, and will sour after a month. Where was I? Ah, yes. We had our tea, and then we put our heads together and reviewed the case.

‘I do have a suspect,’ he said. ‘Yet I don't know how strong a case I can make against him without a means or motive.”

I nodded. ‘The gentleman,’ I said, ‘did protest too much of his good will towards Mrs Tompsett.’

‘Good is one word for it - she is, by all means, an attractive woman. And wasn’t it odd, that he should tell his story only after it was outed by the cook?’

‘A very fishy story,’ I said. ‘For one thing, why would Tompsett have hidden it from his wife? She has a much better head for numbers and would have been the obvious person to consult. And then, why a loan? The guesthouse, from what I see, is doing well; surely they have some money on the side. If anything…’

We paused. It was 1920, you see, and that was the year Wolseley Motors Limited went bankrupt. They’d had bountiful contracts with the State during the War, when they built ambulances and such, but once it was over, the State ended them and brought instead a tax on wartime profits. Part of their workers went on strike, and… it’s old history by now, but it was fresh news then, and Mr Holmes said “By Jove!” and struck the table with his open palm. 

‘He made that up! There _ was _ a loan, but it went vice versa. Prevett must have invested in his old firm, and when it went down, down went his savings too. He first borrowed from Tompsett, but couldn’t repay him, and thus _ he _ came over to beg for a longer stretch loan. But wait. That doesn’t explain what the cook heard - the sea trust worth a gold mine.’

I asked Mr Holmes if it could have been Prevett’s idea, but he shook his head. Prevett, as far as he knew, was a complete landlubber. The sea held no interest for him.

We both refreshed our cups, but the tea was no inspiration. Time to turn to a mightier source, I thought, and asked Mr Holmes if he would mind my saying a little prayer. Think me a fool if you will, I told the great man, but it has helped me out of a rut before, and I dare say will help me again. I feared that he would scoff, but something came into his look - a softening, low-pitched but overly fond, and I knew he was thinking of Dr Watson when he replied that he’d learnt faith from the best. 

So I closed my eyes and asked for help. And when I opened them again…”

This time, it was downright teasing when Miss Marple paused.

“My dear old friend, you can’t leave us in the lurch. What _ did _ you see?”

“Not see,” Miss Marple answered Mr Petherick, smiling. “Hear. The church bells rang in the distance, and the sea breeze carried the sound down to us. And the sound carried my childhood in the Cathedral close, and with it - oh, but you’ve all heard it, I’m sure.”

“The bells?” Dr Pender was nonplussed. “Why, yes, but I fail to see -”

“No, no, oh, no. Not the bells - the nursery rhyme about them.

_ Oranges and lemons, _

_ Say the bells of St. Clement's. _

_ You owe me five farthings, _

_ Say the bells of St. Martin's. _

_ When will you pay me? _

_ Say the bells at Old Bailey. _

_ When I grow rich, _

_ Say the bells at Shoreditch. _

_ When will that be? _

_ Say the bells of Stepney. _

_ I do not know, _

_ Says the great bell at Bow. _

_ Here comes a candle to light you to bed, _

_ And here comes a chopper to chop off your head! _

_ Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead. _

Rather gruesome, but children think nothing of it. I sang that song I don’t know how many times as a girl, and it could be that the whole debt business put it in my mind. I was humming it, mechanically as it were, when Mr Holmes bounced up in his chair.

‘Wait!’ he said urgently. ‘What are those lines again?’

‘_Oranges and lemons_,’ I began, and up went his hand. His deep-sunk eyes were the most focused I ever saw in a human person. They have been called windows to the soul, but on that day I felt as if they let me access the perpetual motion that was his mind. I could see how he took in those two words, _ oranges _ and _ lemons_, and searched for a third that would be their common denominator; while knowing that the link was already there, hiding in plain sight among the vast plains of his knowledge. It was only good form to point it out to him, and I spoke the word at the exact same time as he did. Citrus.”

“Oh!” Sir Henry said, having got there first. “I think I’m… hearing your point, Miss Marple.”

Raymond, who wasn’t, said plaintively, “Well, I don’t see the rhyme or reason of it. How does the song connect with the bees and the murder?”

“Easily,” Miss Marple answered. “But first, we need to go back to Cook’s testimony. What she overheard, she did standing in the yard of a house which looked upon the sea. There was the sea swell within earshot, and the sea brine to be smelled, and the sea, I think, coloured what she heard. There was never a _ sea trust_, real or hypothetical. What Tompsett was doing was thanking Prevett for a device worth a gold mine in his eyes - a _citrus_ spray, guaranteed to keep those pesky bees off his property.”

“I, too, am beginning to see reason,” Mr Petherick said. “Miss Marple, you told us Prevett had been employed by a motor company, so we all pictured him as some sort of steel expert. But motors need oil to run, and oils require a chemist’s touch. Was he by any chance…?”

“He was,” Miss Marple said. “Mr Holmes confirmed it that day. And then, with a little help from his book, we pieced the sorry truth together. Tompsett, poor deluded man, must have asked his scientific friend for a repellant. And Prevett, not wrongly, told him that a citrus spray would do the trick, offering to mix one for him. But what he produced was a solution of condensed _ lemongrass _ oil - which will lure any swarm. He didn’t even need for them to sting his prey: the mere sight of fifty or sixty bees homing in on him would be enough to dispatch a weak-hearted man with a phobia. It was a very cruel thing to do and I wish,” Miss Marple said energetically, “they still chopped off heads for it.”

“What if Tompsett had mentioned the spray?”

“Prevett asked for discretion until it was tested, and Tompsett obliged. He wasn’t a man to trumpet another fellow’s success. Of course, Prevett hadn’t counted on Cook’s presence when he handed the spray, but it was too late to turn back; and when he found that she’d misheard them, he made the best of a bad situation by spinning a lie that would make _him_ the Tompsetts’ benefactor. Killing two birds with a stone, you might say - keeping us off the scent…”

“Ha!” Raymond said, while his elders smiled indulgently.

“... and ingratiating himself with the widow.”

“I take it that he confessed?” Dr Pender asked. 

“He did - after Mr Holmes spoke to the coroner, and they cornered him with the truth. I stayed on until I was assured that Mrs Tompsett would weather the shock, and then I departed for St Mary Mead. It was Mr Holmes in person who drove me to the station. He was a tad brisk in his farewell, but very kind, saying that it was the second time a lady had let him see the light in his career. Well, but _ I _ shall always see him in my thoughts as I did then, his back to the Down cliffs and the sun dusting his head with gold. He _ was _ a gentleman, and a good man, and I hope his bees were taken care of after he passed away.”

Miss Marple’s coda was greeted with a spell of silence.

“I vote,” Joyce said at last, “we have an orange and lemon cake next time, in his honour. And, Raymond, I want a hive. Or two.” She turned to her fiancé. “Or three. Definitely three.” 

“She’s a keeper,” Raymond told the others, a touch of awe in his voice. “Absolutely fearless - even of bees.”

“My dear boy,” Miss Marple said gently. “There is no ground in fear, and no harm in a bee unless one makes it so. They’re keepers, too, and bearers of good luck in many an old tale. You could do worse than have them guard your hearth - so Mr Holmes thought, and I happen to share his opinion. And now let us have another slice of cake, and please do ring Clara and ask if we can have some honey.”


End file.
